Your body continuously heals and renews itself, always self-adjusting towards healthy balance. With very few exceptions our bodies are well equipped to stay alive and most of the time healthy. For example, the metabolic and endocrine systems provide an effective, inner pharmacy. The immune system protects us from the inside and outside threats to our health. Connected to our intuition we listen to our bodies wisdom finding guidance from our “inner physician.” Self-healing constitutes in our bodies automatically all the time in health and disease. Effective healing interventions support the self-healing processes in our bodies. The most positive impact on self-healing is in our practice of educated, consistent self-care applied to our bodies, mind, emotions and spirit. Well-structured self-care is essential for preventing and treating disease. Through practicing self-care we are empowered to partner in our care with healthcare practitioners.

How do we learn self-care? First, let’s consider that in every moment, your beliefs, emotions and actions support health and “ease,” or they contribute to a lack of “ease” known as “disease.” At the same time, your body communicates to you its inner wisdom through the self-healing and feedback processes. You can apply the wisdom of your body to the emotional, mental, spiritual and physical dimensions of your recovery. Unfortunately, we often perceive this communication as annoying, undesired symptom and suppress with medicines them before recognizing their value as the biofeedback. We disregard that communication and continue with unhealthy lifestyle.

Why this discrepancy between our body’s guidance and our health-related decisions? Because we live our life primarily by default to the beliefs, prior experiences, unprocessed emotional traumas all deeply rooted in our subconscious. Therefore, an essential step in self-care is professionally guided self-exploration of those subconscious motives that influence our health-related decisions and may constitute the root causes of our diseases.

Once we identify internal reasons that may interfere with self-healing, we have to partner with the practitioner to develop self-care routines and procedures. Those practiced consistently for at least 28 days will turn into automatic self-healing-enhancing behaviors. Self-care, therefore, is not just about a healthy lifestyle, good diet, exercise, stress management, supplements, etc. It is about exploring and cultivating the motivation and clarity for choosing healthy thoughts, attitudes, and beliefs that reset our “default” behavior to that which supports self-healing. From that place health enhancement becomes automatic, causing more opportunities for creating the desired outcomes in our health and life in general.

However, self-care, while essential for healing, is not easy. It requires professional assistance in all its stages: self-exploration, sophisticated learning and committed application in daily life. This professional assistance is necessary since it invites patients to move away from a passive attitude of receiving outside care to proactive participation in one’s own care. This involves focus, curiosity, determination and persistent hard work.